


In the Spring

by Pippin



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Dealing with PTSD, Gen, Post-Avengers (2012), Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, steve reads a novel, the yellow birds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-29
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-10 03:33:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5569291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pippin/pseuds/Pippin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha gives Steve a novel.  Steve reads the novel.  Steve deals with PTSD.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Spring

**Author's Note:**

> There are some somewhat graphic descriptions of events during the Iraq War. All are in sections that are both bolded and italicized, but not all bolded and italicized sections contain graphic material.

“Steve.”

Steve turned to see Natasha.  “Yes?”

“I have a book I think you’d like.”

She handed him a book wrapped in brown paper and hurried off.  It was odd.  They had only just saved New York a few days earlier, and SHIELD had just hired him, sort of, so he and Natasha were becoming closer, but he hadn’t thought they were that close.

* * *

Back in his apartment, Steve tore the paper off the book.  “National Book Award finalist.” “National bestseller.”   _The Yellow Birds._  

It couldn’t hurt to give it a try.  He didn’t bother reading the back cover or any of the reviews, so he had no idea what the book was about.

**_The war tried to kill us in the spring._ **

A war story, then.  He originally thought it was about World War Two--how original of Natasha; he totally didn’t have a collection of books on that subject already--but then he kept reading, and realized that it was set in the Iraq war, an entirely different kind of war than the one he had been a part of.

**_While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground on prayer.  When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark.  While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation.  It made love and gave birth and spread through fire._ **

So, maybe not _entirely_ different, then.  

Steve settled on his couch to read.  The book was certainly promising, at least.  And he supposed that it would be good for him to read up on this Middle Eastern war, help him relate to the recent vets a bit more.  War was war, but his was a war they learned about in history class, while he knew next to nothing about theirs.

**_It tried to kill us every day, but it had not succeeded.  Not that our safety was preordained.  We were not destined to survive.  In fact, we were not destined at all.  The war would take what it could get.  It was patient.  It didn’t care about objectives, or boundaries, whether you were loved by many or not at all._ **

“I’ve seen that…” Steve murmured.  Too many good men had died ( ~~his heart twisted, thinking of Bucky~~ ), and those who should have died lived on.  It was a fact of war, something they were forced to get over almost immediately.  They really didn’t have a choice.

**_Murph sat up and calmly worked a small dot of lubricant into the action of his rifle.  He chambered a round and rested the barrel against the low wall.  He stared off into the gray angles where the streets and alleys opened onto the field to our front.  I could see into his blue eyes, the whites spiderwebbed with red.  They had fallen further into his sockets during the past few months.  There were times when I looked at him and could only see two small shadows, two empty holes.  I let him push a round into the chamber of my rifle and nodded at him.  “Here we go again,” I said.  He smiled from the corner of his mouth.  “Same old shit,” he answered._ **

Well, _shit._

The image that conjured up was all too clear.  As clear as anything, Steve could see Bucky going through nearly identical motions, arming himself to fulfill his function as the team’s sniper.  Nothing would ever ease that ache, the ache of remembering.  No matter what people said, how they tried to comfort him, the fact still remained that Bucky had fallen, had left Steve, and that the description of those motions reminded Steve painfully of watching Bucky do the same.

**_I was not surprised by the cruelty of my ambivalence then.  Nothing seemed more natural than someone getting killed.  And now, as I reflect on how I felt and behaved as a boy of twenty-one from my position of safety in a warm cabin above a clear stream in the Blue Ridge, I can only tell myself that it was necessary.  I needed to continue.  And to continue, I had to see the world with clear eyes, to focus on the essential.  We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare.   Rare was the bullet with your name on it, the IED buried just for you.  Those were the things we watched for._ **

**_[...]_ **

**_I couldn’t articulate it then, but I’d been trained to think war was the great unifier, that it brought people closer together than any other activity on earth.  Bullshit.  War is the great maker of solipsists: how are you going to save my life today?  Dying would be one way.  If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not._ **

_If you die, it becomes more likely that I will not._  Bucky had died, had fallen screaming from that goddamn train, and Steve had not.

**_You’re nothing, that’s the secret: a uniform in a sea of numbers, a number in a sea of dust.  And we somehow thought those numbers were a sign of our own insignificance.  We thought that if we remained ordinary, we would not die._ **

And some of them became extraordinary, became a living symbol draped in the flag and still did not die, while those who should have lived because they were worth so much more than the star on their chest, fell and died, over and over.

**_We confused correlation with cause and saw a special significance in the portraits of the dead, arranged neatly next to the number corresponding to their place on the growing list of casualties we read in the newspaper, as indications of an ordered war._ **

_~~Barnes, James Buchanan, 32557038.~~ _

**_We had a sense, something we only felt in the brief flash of synapse to synapse, that these names had been on the list long before the dead had come to Iraq.  That the names were there as soon as those portraits had been taken, a number given, a place assigned.  And that they’d been dead from that moment forward._ **

No.  Steve nearly shut the book at that, but forced himself not to.  He understood the logic, there, of course, but he couldn’t think that way, couldn’t think that Bucky had been destined to fall from that train.

But, then again, didn’t that take the blame off Steve’s shoulders?  If Bucky had been destined to fall from the very moment that he joined the military, then there was no way that it was Steve’s fault for not catching him in time.

**_Of course, we were wrong.  Our biggest error was thinking that it mattered what we thought.  It seems absurd now that we saw each death as an affirmation of our lives.  That each one of those deaths belonged to a time and therefore that time was not ours.  We didn’t know the list was limitless.  We didn’t think beyond a thousand.  We never considered that we could be among the walking dead as well.  I used to think that maybe living under that contradiction had guided my actions and that one decision made or unmade in adherence to this philosophy could have put me on or kept me off the list of the dead._ **

_The list was limitless_.  He knew that was true.  Millions upon millions of people had died in his war, and millions more continued to die in pointless wars.  All wars were pointless, since they couldn’t end all following wars.  

Steve closed his eyes.  If all wars were pointless, then all deaths in wars were even more so.  Bucky’s death had accomplished nothing, even his own death had accomplished nothing.  He had been pulled out of the ice and thawed, and woken to find himself fighting the exact same battles.  Even the Tesseract was the same.  He had closed his eyes and opened them again in the same battle, just in a different century and leading the Avengers instead of the Howling Commandos.

**_I didn’t die.  Murph did._ **

Shit shit shit shit shit.  No.  With the amount of time the narrator had spent talking about Murph already, in the first fourteen pages of the book, Steve could tell that he was close to the other man.  And Murph had died.  

 _Bucky_.

**_Murph and I leaned against each other until the weight of our bodies found their balance._ **

How many times had Steve and Bucky done just that, both physically and mentally?  It had been their way, even before the war.  

**_“Incoming!”_ **

**_We moved by rote, our bodies made prostrate, our fingers interlaced behind our heads, our mouths open to keep the pressure balanced._ **

**_And then the sound of the impacts echoed off into the morning.  I didn’t raise my head until the last reverberation faded._ **

**_I looked over the wall slowly, and a din of voices shouted, “All clear!” and “I’m up!”_ **

**_“Bartle?” Murph huffed._ **

**_“I’m up, I’m up,” I said quietly, and I was breathing very hard and I looked out over the field and there were wounds in the earth and in the already dead and battered bodies and a few small juniper trees were turned up and on their sides where the mortars fell._ **

Bombardments had never been fun.  They had been terrifying, the few he had been in.  Steve’s Howling Commandos had been more of a specialized strike team against Hydra, not a team to hide from bombardments on the front lines of a battlefield, so he hadn’t been in proper ones many times.

But, Steve reflected, this team hadn’t been in lines on a battlefield--they had just been in a city, and they were attacked.  The guerilla style of warfare had been adopted by resistance groups in his war, but it seemed as if that was becoming the norm.  He didn’t like it.  He hadn’t been in any recent wars, unless the battle for New York counted, but he missed the clean-cut lines and sides of World War Two.  

**_He looked left, then right, and the dust popped around him, and I wanted to tell everyone to stop shooting at him, to ask, “What kind of men are we?”  An odd sensation came over me, as if I had been saved, for I was not a man, but a boy, and that he may have been frightened, but I didn’t mind so much, because I was frightened too, and I realized with a great shock that I was shooting at him, and that I wouldn’t stop until I knew he was dead, and I felt better knowing we were killing him together and that it was just as well not to be sure you are the one who did it._ **

Of course, Bucky had been their sniper, so he had always known it was him who fired the killing shot.  He had never had that luxury of the not-knowing.  He had shot down so many in defense of Steve and the other Commandos ( ~~though mostly Steve~~ ).  It was very little consolation, but at least he hadn’t had to deal with the guilt of killing so many.  He had died before that.

**_Murph’s always going to be eighteen, and he’s always going to be dead.  And I’ll be living with a promise I couldn’t keep._ **

In some ways Steve was still in his twenties, while at the same time being officially in his nineties.  But Bucky, though...Bucky would always be so young, in his twenties, never aging, never changing, never getting the chance to grow old.

**_“Bartle.  Murphy.  Get your stupid asses over here,” called Sergeant Sterling._ **

**_[...]_ **

**_Murph and I walked over to Sterling and stood at parade rest.  “All right, little man,” he said.  “I want you to get in Bartle’s back pocket and I want you to stay there.”_ **

That brought back the memories from long before the war, from when Steve had been the “little man,” trying so hard to fight his own battles but always ending up behind the shield that was Bucky.

They wondered how he had adjusted so easily to using a shield, why that had been his weapon, so to speak, of choice.  Maybe it was because he had always had a shield.

**_Murph’s features were nearly imperceptibly askew.  [...] Murph’s mouth fell comfortably into a smile._ **

That had always been Bucky.  The permanent smirk, the easy grin.  The little things that Steve missed.

* * *

It was several pages before anything else jumped out at Steve.  But then he found it:

**_The world makes liars of us all._ **

That was so true.  So, so true.  Even as he had tried to stay good, stay pure and clean and innocent and not tarnish his precious “Captain America” image, he had been living a lie.  

Everyone saw the drive to stand up to bullies, not the dingy images of back alley fights.  They saw the smile he had put on for PR films, not the desperate sobs of a man who had watched his home, his world, fall off a train in the Alps.  They only saw the lies he put on for the world.

**_It reminded me of the war, though I was only a week removed from it, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my memories would seem closer the farther I got from the circumstances that gave birth to them._ **

He was both immediately removed from his memories and seventy years removed from them, but, no matter which way Steve looked at it, he could see the truth in that statement.  His memories were all he had.  The veterans of his war were dying off, and soon he would be all that remained.  Him and the books.

There were, of course, the more recent vets, the ones like Sam who fought this strange hit-and-run war in the Middle East, but he had less ability to relate to them.  His memories were all he had.

**_As I looked out onto the trees that edged the road, my muscles tensed and I began to sweat.  I knew where I was: a road in Germany, AWOL, waiting for the flight back to the States.  But my body did not: a road, the edge of it, and another day.  My fingers closed around a rifle that was not there.  I told them the rifle was not supposed to be there, but my fingers would not listen, and they kept closing around the space where my rifle was supposed to be and I continued to sweat and my heart was beating much faster than I thought reasonable._ **

**_I was supposed to be happy, but I cannot recall feeling much of anything except a dull, throbbing numbness._ **

That feeling Steve knew all too well.  The only thing that had made it manageable for him was that he had almost immediately been thrown into the fight for New York, and was now going to be running missions for SHIELD.  Unlike Bartle, he hadn’t stopped fighting.  But, all the same, he had far too much time on his hands, time to weep for the dead and lost, time to look through the files of his Commandos and others he had known back in the war.

He woke up with nightmares far too frequently for his own tastes and found himself reaching for his shield and curling behind it.  He didn’t reach for a gun, never had ( ~~but hadn’t Bucky always been his gun?~~ ), but his shield had to always be within arm’s reach.  He couldn’t sleep otherwise.

At least, he reasoned, there was a lot less inherent danger in grabbing his shield than in reaching for a rifle.  That was good, right?

He had to let himself think so.

**_I had less and less control over my own history each day._ **

Well, that hit the nail on the head.  Steve had lost all control over his own history the second he had agreed to be the human guinea pig for the super soldier experiment.  He believed that, by this point, he was defined more by Captain America and less by Steve Rogers, and that only increased.  The only person to have _really_ known Steve Rogers was long since gone.

**_“Daniel Murphy.  My battle.”_ **

Perhaps Bucky was Steve’s battle, but Steve had always been Bucky’s battle.  From back-alley fights to the fight against Steve’s own body, Bucky had always fought it.

**_If only Murph were here, I thought.  But Murph was not there.  Never would be.  I was alone._ **

_If only Bucky were there.  But Bucky was not there.  Never would be._ Steve was alone.

**_“Ah,” he grunted.  “No one gives a fuck about Murph,” he said.  When he reached the fricative in Murph’s name, he began to laugh.  I could feel his breath on my lips.  As he talked, his eyes flashed a little and the color of them seemed to wash out and deaden.  “Everybody else, man, they don’t want to know.  If they wanted to, they would, right?  It’s not like he’s the only bullshit KIA with bullshit medals and a bullshit story for his mother?”_ **

Not cool, to use a modern term.  Bucky mattered.  He wasn’t a bullshit KIA with bullshit medals.  He had been a member of the Howling Commandos, and that was the least of it.  He had been Steve’s best friend, the best man that he had ever known.  He had saved so many people so many times, and wasn’t exactly KIA anyway.  He had died in an important operation, falling, screaming, not even granted the mercy of the quick death he gave the targets he saw through his sniper rifle.

**_We saw no enemy.  We made up none out of the corners of our eyes.  We were too tired even for that._ **

He had been at that stage before, too tired to even react.  Thanks to the serum, he needed a lot less sleep, so he had taken all-night watches in order to let his men rest.  He wasn’t sure if Bucky had noticed.

They had always made up enemies--sheer paranoia--but there had been times that Steve had been too tired for that.  He had tried to hide it (he tried not to jump at shadows anyway, as a general rule; he was the CO and couldn’t do that to his men, especially since he was more than just a CO--he was _Captain fucking America_ ), but that was the fact of the matter.  It was nice to know that he was not the only one to experience that.

**_At the top of the card, in the appropriate boxes, Murph had written the requested information.  His name: Murphy, Daniel; his rank; his unit.  Below that were other boxes, left blank in case the need arose to record an assortment of information with a quick X in ink.  There was a box for Killed in Action, for Missing in Action, and for Wounded in Action (either lightly or seriously).  There was a box for Captured, and for Detained, and for Died as a Result of Wounds.  There were two sets of Yes or No boxes, one each for Body Recovered and Body Identified.  There was a space for witness remarks and for the signature of the commanding officer or medical personnel.  Murph had placed an X in the box for Body Recovered.  “Just in case,” he said when he caught me looking._ **

Body Recovered.  In Steve’s case, it had been far more recovered than anyone had thought possible.  He had planned to go searching for Bucky’s body after finally defeating Hydra, but clearly life had had other ideas.  And now Bucky’s body would never be recovered.

**_We both laughed.  I took a long pull of the whiskey.  It burned inside my nose and down my throat and down into my stomach.  I had to wipe the back of my hand across my mouth because we were laughing.  Murph took the bottle and took a long swallow.  For a moment we forgot our predicament and were just two friends drinking under a tree, leaned up against a wall, trying to muffle our laughter so we would not get caught._ **

Steve remembered going out drinking with Bucky in Brooklyn, but that blurred together with the European bar they had sat in when Steve was first establishing the Howling Commandos.  When Steve was sealing Bucky’s fate.  The two of them had been just like that.  Two friends drinking together, in a bar rather than under a tree on an active battlefield, but the comparisons were still there.

He had to keep going.

**_Then the colonel came, short, red-haired and walking upright as tall as he could.  He had a reporter and a cameraman with him.  The LT exchanged a few words with him and they both turned to us.  “How’s the war tonight, boys?” he asked.  A broad smile spread over his face in the darkness._ **

**_“Good,” Sterling replied with a dull certainty._ **

**_As if in need of confirmation, the colonel slowly met each of us eye to eye until we’d all said, “Yes, sir, it’s good tonight.”_ **

**_Even in the intermittent light the crispness of his uniform was clearly visible.  He smelled of starch when he came close to us.  He folded his arms across his chest and began to speak, and the smile on his face disappeared.  I briefly wondered which face was the real one before he pulled out a piece of paper and began to read from it, pausing ever so slightly to make sure the reporter was paying attention.  “Are you rolling?”_ **

**_“Go ahead.  Pretend we’re not here.”_ **

**_The colonel cleared his throat and pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket and rested them on the bridge of his nose.  One of the sergeants came over and shined a small flashlight on the colonel’s piece of paper.  “Boys,” he began, “you will soon be asked to do great violence in the cause of good.”  He paced back and forth and his boot prints in the fine dust were never trampled.  Each step was precise and his pacing only served to firm and define the tracks that he had originally left.  The sergeant with the flashlight paced beside him.  “I know I don’t have to tell you what kind of enemy you’ll be up against.”  His voice became a blunt staccato as he gained confidence in his ability to motivate us, a bludgeon that smoothed the weary creases in my brain.  “This is the land where Jonah is buried, where he begged for God’s justice to come.”  He continued, “We are that justice.  Now, I wish I could tell you that all of us are coming back, but I can’t.  Some of you will not come back with us.”  I was moved then, but what I now recall most vividly about that speech was the colonel’s pride, his satisfaction with his own directness, his disregard for us as individuals.  “If you die, know this: we’ll put you on the first bird to Dover.  Your families will have a distinction above all others.  If these bastards want a fight, we’re going to give them one.”  He paused.  A look of great sentimentality came over him.  “I can’t go with you boys,” he explained with regret, “but I’ll be in contact from the operations center the whole time.  Give ’em hell.”_ **

**_The LT started a round of applause.  We’d been told to maintain noise and light discipline, but that had all gone out the window with the camera crew and the colonel’s half-assed Patton imitation._ **

He had always really, really hated having to play a part for the cameras.  They always made him out to be who he wasn’t, the reporters and press corps who clearly didn’t understand how the army worked.  The American public had expected him to be one way, and only the Commandos knew he was completely different.  And now, nearly seventy years in the future, there was no one who knew the real Steve Rogers.  He just had to keep playing his part, playing Captain America. 

People thought that being Captain America meant being a goody two-shoes, being as sweet as apple pie.  Those people, Steve was pretty sure, didn’t know the same America as he did.  The country had been born out of struggle and scrappiness and a tenacity that didn’t allow room for the sweetness people wanted to think.  Steve could play his part, but that part didn’t represent his America.

The speech rang a bell, Steve realized, going back through his memories.  A memory from before he was the Captain.

_“General Patton has said wars are fought with weapons but they are won by men.  We are going to win this war because we have the best men._

_“…and because they are gonna get better._ Much _better._

_“The Strategic Scientific Reserve is an Allied effort made up of the best minds in the free world.  Our goal is to create the best army in history.  But, every army starts with one man.  At the end of this week, we will choose this man.  He will be the first in a new breed of super soldier.  And they will personally escort Adolf Hitler to the gates of Hell.”_

Steve had to say, that speech had been somewhat better than the one in the book.  It was possible that it was because there had been no cameras on Colonel Phillips, so he had spoken to honestly motivate, not just to look good for anyone back home.

**_I thought of my grandfather’s war.  How they had destinations and purpose._ **

Steve realized with a started that the “grandfather’s war” was his own war.  Was the war in which he had given his life, despite coming out alive.  He wasn’t the same man he had been seventy years earlier; he had lost all of that.

They _had_ had destinations and purpose.  They had been going to Hydra bases in order to destroy them.  It was simple.  Unlike this war, which seemed to be killing endless civilians in addition to the actual enemy.  Not that his war hadn’t killed so many civilians, because it had, in bombing raids, but this seemed different.

**_What always happened to me before a fight happened then: a feeling I’d never felt until I went to the high desert to fight.  Every time it came I searched for something to make the knot in my chest make sense, to help me understand the tremble that took over my thighs and made my fingers slick and clumsy.  Murph once came close to describing it. […] He said, “It’s like a car accident.  You know?  That instant between knowing that it’s gonna happen and actually slamming into the other car.  Feels pretty helpless actually, like you’ve been riding along same as always, then it’s there staring you in the face and you don’t have the power to do shit about it.  And know it.  Death, or whatever, it’s either coming or it’s not.  It’s kind of like that,” he continued, “like that last split second in the car wreck, except for here it can last for goddamn days.”_ **

He had thought that he was the only one to feel that way.  That something about him was broken, for as much as Steve wanted to fight, needed to fight, for what was right, he always had that feeling that it wasn’t actually right.  That something terrible was going to happen.  He had felt that way during the war, and he had felt that was leading his new team into battle.  It was nice to know that he wasn’t the only one.

**_I was going home.  But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember._ **

Home was hard to get an image of.  Steve had lost his home, and more than once.  He had lost it when Bucky fell, the better portion of himself left along the innumerable snow and rocks and mountains, and then he had lost it again when he went into the ice.  The person he had once thought that he would make a home with was as lost to him as his best friend was, despite still being alive, and, to Steve, home had always been people, anyway.  Brooklyn had been home more for the people than for the place, and the people had changed drastically while he slept.  He had no home, only the grainy images left behind by the shadow of memory.

**_They’d feel the balled fist of their loneliness grip some bone inside their chest like it was the slightest and most brittle bone God ever made…_ **

This book could have been written about him, Steve realized suddenly.  It also made him realize just how much he had been bottling up.  Once he had realized that everything he had ever known was gone and that he had woken up in the wrong century SHIELD had recommended a therapist for him, but he had never gone, convinced that he was fine.  He had been though bigger obstacles before, he rationalized.  His mother’s death, Bucky’s death, fighting his own body, suddenly not having to fight his own body (and that being a fight in its own way)…waking up in what was essentially a foreign world was nothing.  But, at the same time, he was so goddamn _lonely_.  Sure, he had a new team and a new fight and everything, but it couldn’t replace everything that he had lost along the way.

**_Up on a birch, the initials J.B. had been carved into the sheet of silver bark a half-dozen times […] Of course J.B. is not an uncommon pair of initials…_ **

Bucky had gone through a stage like that in his mid-teens, although of course his initials (the same set, damn it all) weren’t carved into trees.  There hadn’t been enough trees in Brooklyn, so he had instead carved his initials into buildings that no longer stood.  Just another reminder that James Buchanan Barnes was gone forever.

**_I hadn’t known what I was doing then, but my memories of Murph were a kind of misguided archaeology.  Sifting through the remains of what I remembered about him was a denial of the fact that a whole was really all that was left, an absence I had attempted to reverse but found that I could not.  There was simply not enough material to account for what had been removed.  The closer I got to reconstructing him in my mind, the more the picture I was trying to re-create receded.  For every memory I was able to pull up, another seemed to fall away forever. […]  And I’d try to recall things until nothing came, which I quickly found was my only certainty, until what was left of him was a sketch in shadow, a skeleton falling apart, and my friend Murph was no more friend to me than the strangest stranger.  My missing him became a grave that could not be filled or leveled, just a faded blemish in a field and a damn poor substitute for grief, as graves so often are._ **

Steve closed the book, after marking his page.  He needed a break from the hard truths the book was throwing at him—God, Natasha had either chosen very, very well or very, very poorly, and he really wasn’t sure which—and food didn’t sound half bad either.  He was still getting used to having enough food to actually satisfy his massive body and rapid metabolism, and he fully intended to take advantage of it for as long as he could.

* * *

It ended up being several hours later until Steve worked up enough courage to return to the book.  He had done everything he could to put it off, but, at the same time, couldn’t deny how it called to him, called to him with the promise of a story simultaneously nothing like and frighteningly similar to his own.

**_I had become a kind of cripple.  They were my friends, right?  Why didn’t I just wade out to them?  What would I say?  “Hey, how are you?” they’d say.  And I’d answer, “I feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something.  Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy.”  Right._ **

**_Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn’t matter because by the end you failed at the one thing you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners that you’d like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn’t even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on fire?, and Where is all this fucking trash coming from? and even back home you’re getting whiffs of it and then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain, but it’s just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so why not just find a spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean dry place wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and fuck ’em all._ **

Steve threw the book across the room.  He had barely managed to make it through the paragraph since the words kept blurring in front of his eyes, and he was so ashamed at how much of himself he had seen in that but at the same time he couldn’t bother even trying to deny it.  Wanting to sleep forever?  Check.  Your soul is gone?  Check.  No making up for what you are doing?  Check.  The one person you promised would live is dead?  God almighty, _Bucky_.  Everyone is so fucking happy to see you?  He was surprised that there hadn’t been a parade.  You start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down?  Steve didn’t even know what America was anyone, but it sure as hell wasn’t what he had signed up to defend.  You signed up to go, so it’s all your fault, really?  He hadn’t just signed up—he had fought his way into the army.  You wanted to be a man?  He had always been one; what he wanted to do was prove it to the world.

The book was him.  It was him and the author was seeing inside his head and projecting out what he found there under the guise of a different war, but weren’t all wars just the same, really, sending off people to fight and die because governments had no control, because power corrupts, and he had made so many promises to so many people that he had tried to keep but he had been forced to sacrifice along the way and he didn’t even recognize himself anymore in the body of the murderer, the so-called Man With a Plan, except he didn’t even have that because god almighty nothing was what he remembered and he would give it all up in a heartbeat to just be home again, even getting beat up with a body that really didn’t work, but wasn’t home so close, really, he just had to sleep to find it, sleep forever, and while he didn’t actually know the limits of his new body, despite it being war tested, it couldn’t be completely indestructible and he had to be able to die.

He had to.

He couldn’t go on forever.

It would destroy him.

Steve retrieved the book from where it lay near his shield.

**_Daniel Murphy was dead._ **

**_“Not so high up, if you really think about it,” Sterling said._ **

**_“What?”_ **

**_“I think he was probably dead before he fell.  It just isn’t that great a height.”_ **

**_It was truly not a fall from all that great a height: broken bones were broken further, no resistance or attempt to land was made; the body had fallen, the boy already dead, the fall itself meaning nothing._ **

As if.  The fall always meant something.  The fall because he hadn’t been fast enough, strong enough, close enough, good enough.  He could have saved Bucky.  His had been a fall from a great height, and Steve could have prevented it.  It was no small wonder that Bucky haunted his nightmares.

**_And then I saw Murph as I’d last seen him, but beautiful.  Somehow his wounds were softened, his disfigurement transformed into a statement on permanence.  He passed out of Al Tafar on the slow current of the Tigris, his body livid, then made clean by the wide-eyes creatures that swam indifferently below the river’s placid surface.  He held whole even as the spring thaw from the Zagros pushed him further downstream, passing through the cradle of the world as it greened, then turned to dust.  A pair of soldiers watched his passage while resting in the reeds and bulrushes, one calling out to the battered body while the other slept, not knowing Murph was ever one of them, thinking he must be the victim of another war of which they likely did not feel they were a part, and the voice rose softly through the heat, and it sounded like singing when he said, “Peace out, motherfucker,” loud enough to wake his friend, but the body that he called out to would have been, by then, little more than skeleton, Murph’s injuries erased to the pure white of bone.  He reached the Shatt al Arab in summer, where a fisherman who saw him flood into the broad waters where the Tigris and Euphrates marry unknowingly caressed his remains with the pole that pushed his small flat-keeled boat along the shallow waters of the marshes.  And I saw his body finally break apart near the mouth of the gulf, where the shadows of the date palms fell in long, dark curtains on his bones, now scattered, and swept them out to sea, toward a line of waves that breaks forever as he enters them._ **

* * *

Natasha looked up when Steve pushed the book back over to her.

“It’s a gift, Cap.  Keep it.”

Steve shook his head.  “I can’t keep it.”

Natasha looked at him closely, then nodded.  “I understand.”

* * *

Steve finally contacted that therapist SHIELD had recommended.  He couldn’t deny to himself any longer that he had to.  He had seen far too much of himself in that book to deny it any longer.

Bucky was always in his dreams.  There was no getting rid of him, nor did Steve want to.  As much as they were just as often nightmares are they were good dreams and happy memories, Steve would never get rid of him.  There was too much good there.  He had to come to terms with Bucky’s death, anyway.  He was gone, into the valley that would always be his frozen home.  Steve had to live on, to honor Bucky.

It was the only way forward.

**Author's Note:**

> The Yellow Birds is a real novel, by Kevin Powers, and all the quotes really are from the book. It was required summer reading for my AP lit class junior year, and I loved it. There's a lot more to the story than just what is contained here. 
> 
> This came around because I decided that I needed to reread The Yellow Birds, and when I started doing so I saw a lot of Steve in it. So I decided that I needed to write him reading it.
> 
> I'm on Tumblr: smallinsaneone


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